Tasmania 2025: What Went Down When Gray Met The House In 1989

The State Of Play

It's been a rather slow lead-in to Tuesday's resumption of parliament following the as-yet not-firmly-resolved 2025 Tasmanian state election.  Although it has been known for eleven days now that parliament will be resuming on Tuesday, it took til today for any of the seven crossbench units (David O'Byrne for Rockliff) to clearly state support for one side or the other.  Three (the Greens re Labor, Craig Garland and Carlo di Falco re Liberals) have so far said at some stage that they weren't backing one side or the other unless something changes, but all have left the door open for the target of their disappointment to come good.  (See my confidence position tracker for a summary of who has said what.)

An apparently major issue for Labor's foreshadowed constructive no-confidence motion that would be designed to replace Jeremy Rockliff with Dean Winter is the position of the Greens, although it's not clearcut that the motion will pass even if the Greens support it.  There is an impass here in that the Greens are saying they cannot support Labor's motion without concessions on key policy areas but Labor is saying it won't provide any because it went to the election with a clear platform of doing no deals with the Greens.  I'd suggest that the two parties badly need a neutral mediator here except it's not clear these positions can be mediated, and presumably Labor would consider any outcome of a mediation to be a deal with the Greens.  (I have devised a magnificent scheme in which it would actually be a deal with the mediator, which the margin of this page is too small to contain etc ...)

Why I Don't Prefer Abolishing Above The Line Voting

This week I sent a submission (not yet posted) to the Victorian Electoral Matters committee, concerning the 2018 Victorian election.  Primarily, my submission called for the abolition of Group Ticket Voting in the Victorian Legislative Council and its replacement with a Senate-style system or similar.  This follows a farcical, gamed-to-death 2018 election in which ten micro-party MLCs were elected from primary vote shares eight of them would not have won from under any other system, including two from less than 1% of the vote.

In the event that Victoria won't abolish Group Ticket Voting completely, I suggested the state at least clip its wings a little by:

* allowing an above-the-line preferencing option, so that votes that were just-1 above the line would still be distributed by Group Ticket, but voters could choose to distribute their own party preferences as in the Senate.

* banning preference trading and a range of related consultant activities

* bulk-excluding all parties that fail to clear a primary vote threshold of 4% at the start of the count

2016 Ehrlich Awards For Wrong Predictions

It's time for the fifth annual giving of the Ehrlich Awards, which round the start of each year go to the most amusingly or staggeringly wrong predictions I observe in any field of interest relating to the previous twelve months.  The Ehrlichs are named for Paul Ehrlich, the evangelist of ecological end-times who put me on a path to a lifetime of health scepticism of dark green gloomery when he not just lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon but also gave poor excuses for the defeat. For the past editions click the Ehrlich Awards tab at the bottom, and for the ground rules see the 2012 edition.

As usual I should note my own predictive efforts are hardly perfect, but I had a pretty good year in 2016, missing by only two on the Coalition's national Reps seat tally (for example).  I did wrongly predict two Reps seats in my own home state, which was embarrassing, though I did indicate those were quite uncertain.

Two areas of widespread predictive failure that will dominate these Awards were the US election and Senate reform.  They weren't the only ones I noticed.  For instance the late Bob Ellis made a bold bid for posthumous glory with "It is likely, though not certain, that Malcolm Turnbull will lose his seat" - Turnbull won his seat 68:32 with a trivial 1.2% swing against him.  But I think the two I've mentioned are the most interesting ones and I've decided to make the US election case the dishonourable mentions, saving Senate reform for the medals.

Can Required Multiple Preferencing Solve The Senate Reform Mess?

Senate reform has been a major focus of this site since the farcical outcomes of the 2013 Senate election.  The massive gaming of the Senate system by preference-harvesting micro-parties resulted in candidates being elected from very low primary votes, in a candidate being elected because of confusion about party names, in one state's election having to be cancelled and rerun because of the loss of a relatively small number of votes, and countless other absurd things.  Nearly two and a half years after that election, and almost two years after the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters delivered a unanimous report in favour of an alternative, we were, until very recently, still to see any serious commitment to fixing the disaster from either major party.

The JSCEM proposal was to scrap group ticket voting and instead allow voters to distribute their own preferences above or below the line, although if they did so below the line a minimum of six numbers would be required.  Voters could continue to just vote 1 above the line, but if they did so then once all candidates from their chosen party were elected or excluded, their vote would exhaust from the count.  This is very similar to the system used in the NSW Upper House.

The JSCEM proposal has come under a number of attacks, claiming it would unfairly exclude minor parties (wrong), that it would advantage the Coalition (wrong and wrong again), that it would permanently stop "progressive" control of the Senate (wrong), that the existing system is sound (wrong and wrong) and so on.  Beyond the reality that there is no perfect solution, none of the attacks have had any merit at all, but there is still a lot of wariness of the JSCEM proposal, especially in Labor ranks.

Mackerras Piece Misleading On Senate Reform

As noted in the last part of my multi-volume series about people being Wrong On The Internet about Senate reform, nothing has happened publicly on this issue for some time.  But erroneous op-eds attacking the JSCEM-proposed model continue to appear in the media now and then, and the latest to muddy the waters (again) is Malcolm Mackerras in the Canberra Times.

While the consensus of psephologists Australia-wide favours scrapping the current Group Ticket preferencing system that has been gamed to death by preference-harvesters and other exploiters of confusing ballot papers (while retaining above-the-line voting for one or more parties), Mackerras has held out against this from the start.  Initially he argued that it would be acceptable to allow voters to stop after filling in 15 boxes below the line.  As the debate has progressed he has shifted to supporting a requirement for a minimum of six boxes below the line, which he now describes as "the easy and right thing" to do.  

Optional Senate Preferencing: Not An ALP/Liberal/Green Stitch-Up

Advance Summary

1. This article welcomes the recent interim Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters report into the Senate voting system and generally supports its recommendations.

2. One important issue in Senate voting reform not yet adequately addressed is the calculation of transfer values for surplus votes. 

3. A recent article by Malcolm Mackerras claims that nearly all Senators elected in 2013 were elected by informed voter choice and that major parties are changing the system opportunistically while their vote is falling.

4. However, the Coalition's Senate vote only fell in 2013 because of defects in the current Senate system.

5. At least four and possibly as many as seven Senate outcomes in 2013 did not fairly reflect the will of the voters.

6. The idea that micro-parties combined should be entitled to seats in proportion to their total vote share assumes that micro-party voters very strongly prefer other micro-parties generally to the bigger parties.

7. Analysis of actual Lower House micro-party preference flows shows that any such assumption is false.